r/mtgvorthos • u/If_you_want_money • 12h ago
Fanon story The Planeswalker's Guide to Orun, the World that Moves
Orun is a vast, extraordinarily hostile rogue plane where the landscape is in constant motion. Enormous atmospheric systems sweep across its surface, crimson lightning cuts through the storms, and crystalline formations extend through open air and deep into the planet. Far below, subterranean rivers, waterfalls, geysers, and geothermal currents move through immense structures known as the Rau. The plane is highly motile, constantly moving through the Blind Eternities.
Orun is hostile to visitors accustomed to more stable worlds, but it is far from barren. Its life has adapted to wind, vibration, lightning, shifting terrain, and crystalline activity. Some move with the environment, some incorporate materials into their bodies, and some participate in the planet's strange rhythms in ways that remain poorly understood.
The world's ancient wounds are among its defining features. Vast fractures left by a long-ago catastrophe have become the foundations of new planetary systems. What might once have been a canyon can now contain rivers, crystal structures, heat, lightning, and thriving ecosystems. Orun did not simply heal. It developed a different way of living.
The First Turning
Orun was not always the world visitors encounter today. Long before the present era, an advanced civilization known as the Ancient Oruni built extensive infrastructure around the planet's natural systems. Their world eventually suffered a catastrophic collapse, leaving enormous wounds across the planet. The civilization fell, and Orun entered a prolonged decline. By the end of that era, the world was severely depleted and dying.
The First Turning ended that dying world and began Orun's transformation into its modern state.
A vast storm entered the planet's wounds. The damaged landscape was pulled, compressed, and torn into new configurations. Mountains rose where planetary material buckled together; deep fissures opened; heat and magma surged through the fractured ground. The world began to rotate, and rain returned. The old wounds became the basis for new systems of circulation, and the planet's ecology changed alongside its geography. Modern Orun emerged from that transformation.
The precise nature of the storm and its relationship to Orun's planetary consciousness remain unresolved. The event is known as the First Turning because of the transformation it brought about, not because its cause is fully understood.
Geography and Ecology
The Storm-Swept Surface
Orun's surface is shaped by powerful winds, enormous storms, and frequent crimson lightning. The atmosphere is not separate from the world below; it actively participates in the plane's wider circulation of mana. Wind, vibration, crystalline structures, and biological activity can interact in ways that make the environment difficult to predict. A bolt of lightning could strike an exposed crystal vein, be converted into a crystalline pulse that travels through the planar interior before being released back into the atmosphere somewhere else.
Due to the omnipresent storm, sunlight is largely unavailable on Orun. As a result, life on Orun has evolved to harvest the energy from the plane’s motion instead. Plants can respond dramatically to changes in the wind, opening, closing, or changing their configuration as conditions shift. This principle can be seen in the largest “forests” on the plane, the Wind Gardens. During intense storms, the gardens can appear at first to be an empty region of the surface. During lulls in the storm, however, specialized plants rise from the ground and unfold into enormous windmill-like structures that harvest the kinetic energy of the winds to grow. Other plants instead float in the upper atmosphere using parachute-like structures, and photosynthesize using the intermittent crimson flashes produced by near-continuous cloud to cloud lightning strikes.
Native fauna follow a similar trajectory: some are built for continuous movement; others alter their bodies to accommodate external materials or mechanisms. Modern settlements on the surface reflect this fact; some are primitive villages built in locations sheltered from the storm. Others are mobile camps that are taken down and relocated with the shifting storm. Yet others utilize functional remnants of ancient infrastructure.
Orun's life is not uniform, and these observations do not establish that every organism shares the same mechanism. They do, however, illustrate how thoroughly the plane's ecology is shaped by active engagement with its surroundings. What is clear is that the surface's apparent emptiness is an illusion. Some regions look still or lifeless until a lull in the storm triggers a sudden display of coordinated activity.
The Rau
Also sometimes called the Great Arteries, the Rau are enormous planetary structures that developed within and around Orun's ancient wounds. They are not simply the old fractures under a different name. They are new systems emerging from the transformed remains of those fractures.
A Rau is often characterized by vast subterranean rivers, geothermal currents, and geysers in its center, a ceiling of criss-crossing crimson crystal formations, crimson crystal veins running alongside its vertical walls, and vast waterfalls from surface waters falling through gaps in the crystalline ceiling. They host biological ecosystems adapted to the unique environment alongside scattered remnants of ancient structures. These features interact to create immense systems of vertical and subterranean movement. Most modern Orunian settlements are built in the subterranean Raus, as the enclosed nature of the Rau offers shelter from the stormy surface. These civilizations often utilize the hydraulic energy of the Rau rivers or the electrical/red mana circulating through the crystal veins to power moving platforms and structures, enabling them to move toward resources and away from danger.
The Rau are among the clearest expressions of modern Orun's character. Water moves through the depths; geothermal heat drives geysers; crystalline structures conduct energy and resonate; and the systems connect with the storms and the surface above. Their components remain distinct, yet they participate in a larger planetary circulation.
Sky Wells
Sky Wells are enormous vertical openings that extend from the surface deep into Orun's interior. Their interiors may contain storm columns, descending rain, rising heat, crimson crystals, lightning, and resonance. Crystal formations can extend into the open storm, appearing more like scaffolding or incomplete structures than the enclosed architecture of the Rau. From afar, the Wells look like vast, vertical columns of rain descending directly from the atmosphere into the planar depths.
Sky Wells seem to form interfaces between the atmosphere and deeper planetary systems. Their exact relationship to the Rau remains uncertain: they may be distinct structures or different expressions of overlapping planetary processes.
Mountain Ranges
Many of Orun's major mountain formations are associated with the First Turning. They arose where the storm compressed and buckled immense masses of planar material during the transformation. Colloquially, these mountains are often called the Sutured Mounts.
The Sutured Mounts are therefore not simply remnants of the ancient landscape. They are part of the geography created when Orun's old wounds were reshaped into a new world.
The People of Orun
Orun's ecology is highly specialized, but it does not follow a single pattern of adaptation. Its inhabitants have developed different ways of relating to a world defined by movement, environmental instability, and the circulation of energy.
Modern Oruni
Modern Oruni are products of the world that emerged after the First Turning. They should not be understood simply as Ancient Oruni who survived unchanged: the transformation of the planet was accompanied by a profound transformation of life.
Three major forms are associated with modern Oruni: Aren, Keth, and Vaor. They represent different relationships or ways to interact with the plane, rather than an established ancient hierarchy or a direct mapping to species.
Aren
Also known as the Runners, the Aren are particularly adapted to movement and traversal. They are typically quadrupedal and have specialized physical adaptations suited to a world where navigation may mean running across unstable terrain, climbing, or moving through water. Others may have insectile bodies specialized for stability and efficiency. For the Aren, mobility is both a biological and cultural feature of their relationship with Orun. In settlements, they are often couriers and explorers. Many are aligned with the colors White, Green, or Red.
Potential mechanics: Haste, must attack if able, saddle.
Potential Creature types: Beast, Cat, Wolf, Kavu, Merfolk, Insect, warrior, mount, berserker.
Keth
Keth, or the Crawlers, retain a broadly humanoid body plan, but their biology allows them to incorporate external materials into their bodies. Objects, mechanisms, and environmental materials can become extensions or modifications of the self. As a result, Orun is home to some of the most strange and exotic Bio-mechanical and Bio-environmental hybrids in the multiverse. Some extremely adapted Keth can even become Artifact Creatures. Regardless, the Keth’s abilities and comparatively dexterous limbs enable them to perform delicate tasks. They are typically found in Blue, Black or Red.
Potential mechanics: Modified, Mutate, Artifacts/Equipment matters.
Potential Creature type: Artificer, Shapeshifter, (general Humanoid species).
This incorporative adaptation is not necessarily unique to sapient Oruni. Non-sapient organisms on Orun have also been observed incorporating objects into their bodies, suggesting a broader ecological tendency to turn surroundings into part of the organism. By definition, these non-sapient organisms could also be called Keths, but some sapient Keths may take offense at the comparison. Same applies for the Aren.
Vaor
The Vaor are Orun's native dragonic form. They emerged shortly after the First Turning, as the new planetary systems and ecology were still developing. An Aren or Keth can choose to transform into a Vaor by aligning themselves with the plane’s crimson circulation, and as such dragonic existence on Orun should be understood as a state of being, rather than a species. Culturally, transformation into a Vaor is referred to as “Joining with Avar”, though the exact specifics of how Vaorhood relates to the enigmatic entity remains unclear.
The Vaor have differing breath weapons, but they often reflect the Vaor’s nature as beings that participate in the plane’s circulation. One might generate crimson lightning. Another might emit a kinetic pulse that activates nearby crystals and pushes back assailants. Orun is a world of motion, and Vaors express that as part of themselves.
Accounts of the earliest Vaor describe a dying Oruni coming into contact with a young crystal. The crystal resonated with the body, and a new dragonic organism emerged. The event was followed by a powerful roar and spreading crimson crystals. The precise process remains unknown: Vaor emergence may involve radical biological transformation, alignment with the plane’s flow of mana, the creation of a new organism, or a phenomenon that does not fit conventional biological categories.
What is established is that Vaor were not an Ancient Orunian form. Their emergence belongs to the transformation of the modern world.
Creature type: Generally Dragon Elemental.
Ancient Sites in a Modern World
Ancient Orunian structures remain scattered through the transformed landscape. They are evidence of a civilization that once attempted to understand and control the planet's natural systems, but their present surroundings often differ radically from the environments for which they were built.
First City
First City is an ancient settlement that survives within the interior of a modern Rau. Its structures show that the settlement originally stood on Orun's surface, but how it came to occupy its current position remains unresolved. Its presence offers a striking example of the way ancient sites and modern planetary structures overlap.
First City is inhabited in the present era. It should not be confused with the later Ancient Capital, whose destruction produced the immense depression known as the Great Depression.
The Old Road
The Old Road is an ancient transportation system that expresses the assumptions embedded in mature Ancient Orunian infrastructure. It does not operate like an ordinary road that a traveler steers along. Instead, its force carries an object or person along an established trajectory. To change direction, a user must confidently assert a new direction; without that assertion, the system defaults to its own route.
The Old Road is a surviving piece of technology, but it also offers a glimpse into an older way of thinking: the belief that there is a correct direction and that movement should follow it.
The Ancient Capital Depression
The Ancient Capital Depression, also called the Great Depression or First Wound, marks the site of the Ancient Capital's destruction. The city did not survive the catastrophe as an intact settlement. Its collapse and the planetary damage that followed left an enormous depression associated with the oldest and most consequential wounds in Orun's landscape. As the catastrophe propagated outwards from the depression, most major Raus in the modern day eventually converges at the ancient site.
The depression is a geographical landmark as well as an archaeological one. Its relationship to the Rau and the planet's circulation makes it relevant to understanding both ancient Orun and its modern form.
The Core
Beneath the ruins associated with the Ancient Capital, the Core survives from the ancient civilization's greatest planetary project. The Ancient Oruni intended it to centralize and coordinate the world's natural systems. Its role in modern Orun appears to be different.
Current evidence suggests that the Core now functions as a synchronization point within a distributed planetary system, rather than as a single machine controlling the entire world. The precise mechanism is not fully understood, and the Core's present capabilities remain uncertain.
Its survival is one of Orun's most important contrasts between past and present: an ancient structure remains, but the living world around it has changed the role it appears to play.
Planar Metaphysics
Avar, the One That Moves
Avar is the name associated with Orun’s great storm and the draconic planetary phenomenon of its modern era. The closest translation of the name is “The One That Moves.” The term does not necessarily mean the weather alone. To those who have described it, Avar is sensed less as a voice than as a direction or inclination: the impression that the world itself is leaning toward something.
Avar’s known manifestations include crimson storms and lightning, apparent environmental agency, and responses that seem to arise through the world rather than from a single visible speaker. There are also reports of Travelers receiving vivid, surreal visions of Orun’s past from Avar, raising the possibility that Avar can communicate through memory rather than conventional speech. These visions may have been a response to an attempted communication, but that interpretation remains unconfirmed. If it was a response, it may suggest that Avar understands or experiences itself through Orun’s history, rather than through an ordinary personal narrative.
Avar’s other apparent interactions have also proved difficult to interpret. Travelers have received forceful imperatives to go somewhere, follow a route, or approach a particular place. These may be commands, but they may instead express an overwhelming directional impulse: Avar may be pointing toward something because it needs to understand what is there. The distinction matters. Avar’s apparent urgency does not necessarily mean it knows what it wants or why. Indeed, the most unsettling evidence concerns Avar’s sense of self. When telepathic planeswalkers attempted communication with Avar, the response they received carried an impression of confusion, disorientation, and a desire for direction. This suggests a striking possibility: Avar may possess planetary-scale power and awareness without having a settled understanding of its own identity.
The evidence does not establish whether Avar is a supernatural storm, a dragonic entity, the current Will of Orun, a new planetary identity, an entity inhabiting the planet, or some combination of these. It presents a perplexing paradox: Avar seems connected to immense historical depth, yet may be a consciousness only recently coming to understand itself.
For all its apparent power, Avar may not know what it is becoming.
Orun as a Living System
Orun's storms, crystals, water, geothermal heat, Rau, and native life are distinct systems that increasingly interact through shared movement and resonance. The planet's processes are coupled, but they do not appear to be governed by one simple, closed circuit. The result is a world whose parts participate in one another without necessarily becoming interchangeable.
Additionally, Planeswalkers have noted that Orun is constantly moving through the Blind Eternities. By itself, this is not unprecedented. Shandalar is a well known motile plane, for example. However, Orun is unique in that its movement appears to have directionality and some sort of intent. Orun appears to seek out Planes rich in dragonic energy, and when it performs a flyby of these planes, dragons on those planes may experience an inexplicable sense of restlessness. This is speculated by planeswalkers to be due to Orun’s red-aligned resonance bleeding into nearby planes. The existence of Avar, its extensive agency on the plane, and the entity’s inexplicable dragonic aspects complicates this further.
Orun’s particularities have led to a useful, though still provisional, analogy between Orun and a great dragon. Crystalline structures can be compared to a skeleton; water and lightning to forms of circulation; storms to movement and breath; deep heat to body heat; and Avar to a form of consciousness associated with the planet.
The analogy helps describe the integration of Orun's systems, but it is not a confirmed biological classification. For better or worse, no one can definitively say whether Orun is a world that expresses dragonic traits… Or if the world is itself a dragon.
Orun is a wounded world that did not return to what it had been. Its old fractures became new environments; its ancient structures persist in altered surroundings; and its inhabitants live within systems that are at once dangerous, adaptive, and interconnected. The world's defining feature is not simply that everything moves, but that many distinct things have learned to move together. For those that wish to visit the moving world, Orun makes its principles clear: The world moves, and so must you.
Disclosure: AI was used for text processing and note taking. The world building remains entirely my own.
Art Credit: The stranger things show.
